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The internationalization and “Englishization” of higher education have become a phenomenon across the world and are intricately linked to neoliberal ideologies, policies, and practices (Barnawi, 2018; Phan, 2017; Phan & Barnawi, 2015). As part of this phenomenon, there has been an exponential growth of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in national universities (Macaro et al., 2018) and English-medium international branch campuses (IBCs), with their parent institutions largely based in the United States and United Kingdom (De Costa et al., 2021). In many of these institutions, EMI may be interpreted as English only and local languages ignored (Sahan & Rose, 2021). This is often motivated by neoliberal and political agendas, pushing for monolingual practices in the classroom (see Sahan & Rose, 2021; Sahan et al., 2022). In English-medium IBC contexts, the use of local and indigenous languages may be viewed as not fulfilling contractual obligations with home institutions or funding institutions to offer equivalent degree programs or as going against the conceptualization that IBCs should mirror their home campuses as much as possible in terms of curricula, academic rigor, reputation, and tradition (Graham et al., 2021).

While EMI and IBC institutions of higher education continue to spread around the world, there has simultaneously been an ideological and multilingual shift happening in applied linguistics, moving away from monolingual pedagogies and English-only policies in the classroom to multilingual/translingual/plurilingual pedagogies (see Cenoz & Gorter, 2013; Conteh & Meier, 2014; Kubota, 2016; Losey & Shuck, 2022 …